8.7.14

SLADE - A second extract from Don Powell's book

Over the weekend I posted my Melody Maker reports of Slade’s concert at Earls Court
on July 1, 1973, perhaps the greatest night of their career. It is ironic that
only a few days days later came Slade’s greatest tragedy, the car crash in
which Don Powell’s girlfriend died and Don suffered life-changing injuries.

This
second extract from Don’s book Look What I Dun: My Life In Slade deals with the crash and its immediate
aftermath, a bit longer than most posts.

In the early hours of July 4, 1973, Don picked up his
girlfriend, Angela Morris, from the Dix Nightclub in Wolverhampton, where she
worked, the two driving off in Don’s white Bentley. A few minutes later the car
left Compton Road, flew through a hedge and smashed up against a tree and a
brick wall adjoining a local school. Both Don and Angela were thrown out of the
car in a way that made it impossible to tell who had been driving. Angela was
killed instantly.

By chance, two nurses passed the
accident scene minutes after the crash and helped to save Don’s life. They
called the hospital and requested an ambulance.

“There
was an ambulance nearby, dealing with a pregnancy,” says Don, “and that’s why,
when the nurses called the hospital, they knew the ambulance was in the
vicinity. In the ambulance, they dropped the baby and came for me. If it hadn’t
been for that, I would have been dead. The nurses were holding my head
together, as it was split open. It was a miracle that I survived.

“I don’t
remember the crash, but I get flashbacks of being wheeled into hospital on an
upright stretcher. My head fell to one side and I didn’t feel like I was lying
down, so it must have been an upright stretcher. But after that, I don’t
remember anything.”

Don was
brought to the Wolverhampton Royal Hospital, where surgeons worked on him for
hours. They had to drill into his skull to ease the internal pressure, and many
broken bones and deep cuts had to be attended to as well. Afterwards, Don was
put on a bed of ice to keep his soaring temperature down. He was more or less
in a coma for five days. When he did wake up, he still wasn’t quite conscious
at first.

“One time, I panicked,” Don recalls. “I
vaguely remember it. I woke up shivering, not realising that I was on a bed of
ice. There were tubes everywhere and I just panicked. I didn’t know where I
was, or why I was there. I pulled out the tubes and got out of bed, and that
was when the nurses came rushing in. They put me back to bed and I asked, ‘What
am I doing here?’ and they said I had been in an accident. But it didn’t sink
in. It didn’t mean anything to me. I kept drifting in and out of consciousness.

“At one point, a doctor came when I was
in bed and he also said, ‘You’ve been in a car accident.’ And it was strange,
because I must have still been aware of certain things. I did remember that I was in a band, and my recollection was that we
had been coming back from a gig and I thought the rest of the guys were in the
same position as me, somewhere in the hospital. I thought we’d all been in a
crash, so the rest of the guys must be there somewhere. The next thing when I
came round again, they were all sitting at the bottom of the bed in hospital
gowns and that freaked me.”

“Don’s accident was horrible,” says his
sister Carol. “Just horrible. Mum broke down completely. It was so strange. I’d
dreamt about it the night before. I’d dreamt of Don, a very unpleasant dream,
and in the dream, I kept reassuring Don that it would be all right. It would be
OK. And then I woke up to learn that Don had had his accident.

“And that poor girl died. We didn’t
know her, as she and Don had just started dating, but it was awful. My dad went
to the hospital and they asked him if Don did drugs. There was nothing of that
sort back then, but they had to ask, as they were afraid that he was dying. It
was awful. Dad cried.

“News got out very fast. Everybody in
the street was talking about it and the fans were literally invading our home.
They were all over. I’d married Gerald by then, but they even invaded our
house. They were crawling the drains and they ruined my garden. But they sent
Don so many nice get-well cards. He had hundreds and hundreds of them.”

“The support from the fans was
incredible,” Don agrees, “and the support from the rest of the guys as well,
Nod, Jim and Dave.”

After a while, Don didn’t need the
tubes and pipes any more, but still, the details of the accident were kept from
him.

“I was there for quite a while before
anyone told me what had happened,” Don recalls. “When I didn’t have the tubes
any more, I got to the toilet. Afterwards, I washed my hands and came to look
in the mirror. I had no hair, my face was all smashed, with black eyes and
teeth missing and that big crack in the head, held together by clamps. I was so
shocked that I fell into the back wall. It was terrible. I thought, somebody
has got to tell me what’s going on. I kept asking, ‘Please, tell me what has
happened!’

“Dad told me about the accident. Then
he said, ‘Your girlfriend has died.’ He didn’t say Angela, so I thought it was [previous
girlfriend] Pat, because I didn’t remember Angela, as I’d lost my short-term
memory. I only remembered Pat.”

“When Don had his accident, Pat was
away,” adds Carol. “She didn’t learn about it until she landed at the airport.
It was on all the front pages; she saw it at the airport and broke down
completely. She would have wanted to be there for Don.”

“Pat actually came to see me in
hospital,” Don explains, “but she was told, ‘You can’t see him yet, because he
thinks it is you who has died.’ The press wrote that my fiancée was dead, but I
had never been engaged to Angela, as I had only known her for a few months. Pat
was the one I had been engaged to, and only gradually did I understand that it
was Angela who had died. That freaked me, because I didn’t remember her. It got
out in the press and, of course, her parents saw it and that was not very good.
When I got out of hospital, I went to see them obviously and explained about my
amnesia, that it was the reason why I didn’t remember their daughter.”

Don’s
friends and colleagues were all shocked by the accident and the death of his
girlfriend. “The phone rang in the early hours of the morning,” Jim recalls,
“and I was mortified by the dreadful news for days, until I saw him in the
flesh, just to make sure he was still there. A lifelong tragedy for Don, but a
mortal tragedy for his lovely girlfriend, Angela.”

“I knew Don’s fiancée, Pat,” Carole
Williams says, “but I was not aware that they had split, so the morning I heard
about the accident, I really thought it was Pat in the car with him. I had been
friends with her younger sister; I used to take her to football matches and had
got to know the family. It was only when I rang them that I knew Don was with
someone new. I really followed the news to see how he was, as it did not seem
right to intrude when we had not seen each other for a while.”

“The
first time I heard about the accident, I was at my parents’ house,” Dave says.
“The call came early in the morning. My sister Carol answered the phone. It was
a neighbour, who said Don had been in an accident, but we didn’t know till
later that it was serious. Angela had been killed and Don was in hospital in a
serious condition and was not expected to survive. Well, I was in shock, and so
was Carol, as Angela was her best friend. It’s hard to explain how I felt. All
I can say is, it was a dreadful time. Things had been going so well, we were
number one in the charts, we had just done a big show at Earls Court in London,
and then suddenly this happens! I was absolutely gutted. All my thoughts went
to Don, just hoping he would pull through.”

“Don’s accident was frightening,”
echoes [tour manager] Swinn. “The first time I saw him in hospital he was
unconscious, tubes everywhere. His head had been shaved. And for a week we
didn’t know if it was touch and go.”

“I learnt about it in a very strange
way,” says [Slade roadie] Haden Donovan. “I was back working with my brother’s
band, because there was a gap between Slade gigs. We were playing a week in a
club in Somerset and, when we got to the gig one night, we were told, ‘People
have tried to get in touch with you lot all day. Can you phone this number
immediately?’ That was how we found out, because we hadn’t seen the newspapers
and we hadn’t heard the news on the radio.”

Don’s accident affected many people,
making them realise how quickly everything could come to an end. That thought
made Dave marry his girlfriend, Janice, while Don was in hospital. They married
in Mexico in July 1973.

“The four of us, Dave and Jan and
Angela and myself, had planned to go to Los Angeles for a holiday after the
English tour,” Don explains. “Dave called my father after the accident and
asked if it was all right that he and Jan still went. My dad said, ‘Of course
it is. Don wouldn’t want you not to go because he is in hospital. You go.’ And
that was when they got married in Mexico.”

“Everybody was so considerate,” Don’s
sister Carol states. “They were great with us at the time of the accident. We
only had one bad experience. When Don was still at hospital, somebody called us
and said she was a nurse. She said we should hurry to hospital because Don was
dying. And we got all hysterical. There were only us women in the house, Mum
and me and my sister, Marilyn, and when we got to the hospital, we found out
that it was just a very nasty prank. That was really unpleasant, somebody doing
that.”

“I
remember another unpleasant incident,” says Don, “although that came out of
thoughtlessness, rather than ill will. I got a lot of mail from fans and
friends and I read that in bed in hospital. Then came a letter from Chicago,
from Ludwig drums. I was really ill, almost lying on my deathbed, and they had
sent me was the details of a funeral service! It turned out that Bill Ludwig I
had died, and it was so typically American that they sent out the whole funeral
service, with the prayers and the hymns and everything. Only in America! And I
thought, ‘What the fuck! I’m on my
deathbed and they send me a funeral service!’”

Six
weeks after the crash, Don was released from hospital. He went with Jim and his
wife, Louise, to Bournemouth for a week, staying at the home of their tour
promoter, Mel Bush, before moving home, where his family took care of him.

“The first long time was awful,” Carol
says. “Don’s memory was all gone, he couldn’t remember a thing and kept
repeating everything. He could tell you the same thing 12 times over, without
knowing that he had just told it. It was frustrating. But Don then gave the
whole family a trip to Malta, and it was the first time I had travelled outside
England. It was so generous of him. He said it was his way of thanking us for
taking care of him.”

“I felt so inadequate,” Don admits. “I
didn’t know what else to do. Before, I used to have such an impeccable memory,
but now! It was horrible. At least I found out that I used to fancy one of the
nurses at hospital. I didn’t remember anything about it, but apparently when
she came over to tuck me in, I used to grab her and hold her by the bed. So
when I went to visit the staff at the intensive care, after I had been
released, she just looked at me with squinting eyes and said, ‘You! What are
you doing here? Get out!’

“Still, it was awful, as my memory was
really, really bad. I didn’t remember a thing about the accident but, as the
specialist said to me, ‘What do you want to remember that for? You’ll never
remember it. Don’t even try. The brain switches off just before an accident and
it switches on again after.’ And he was right. The accident happened near where
I used to live, in Wolverhampton, and when I got out of hospital, I had to
drive past the wall and the school every day, but it didn’t mean anything to
me.”

The question of who had been driving
Don’s Bentley on that fateful night remained.

“When
Don finally came out of hospital, he remembered nothing,” Andy Scott says. “He
didn’t even know who was driving, for all the speculation in the world.”

“Perhaps one of the most spiteful early
rumours about Don in Fleet Street concerned his revelation on leaving hospital
that he had lost his memory following the horrendous car crash,” Keith Altham
adds. “‘Very convenient’, one jaundiced Fleet Street scribe described his
condition to me. ‘You just don’t know how severe his injuries were,’ I told him.
‘He nearly died and you do not know the man,’ I added angrily. ‘He could not be
more genuine.’”

“It said in the media that it must have
been Don driving that night, because Angela never drove the car,” Haden Donovan
says. “That was a lie. When Don was in America the first time with Slade, I had
to take my brother David in my uncle’s car to Don’s parents to pick up the
Bentley and drive it over to Angela’s house. She used to drive it to work.
Also, there was talk about a person who saw the car go past on the night of the
accident, and he said it was a pretty young girl driving. I think the autopsy
said that she had bad bruises from the steering wheel as well.”

Don attended the coroner’s court,
although he was not called to give evidence, as he couldn’t remember the
accident anyway. Dix’s owner, Richard Brownson, said that he had taken the car
keys from Angela and given them to Don, before the couple left the club. On the
other hand, a witness had seen Angela climb into the driver’s seat outside
Dix’s, but could not swear who was at the wheel when the car drove off. Coroner
Walter Forsyth said there was doubtful evidence as to who drove the car and the
jury brought in an open verdict.

The nurses who had helped Don at the
accident scene hadn’t been called to give evidence, as no one knew who they
were, but eventually Don was to find out. “Many years later, I got in touch
with one of the nurses who had helped save me,” he says. “There was this guy
who was doing an article about the crash and he asked, ‘Would you let me try to
find out who the nurses were?’ He then got the number of one of them, gave it
to me and said, ‘She would love to hear from you,’ and I really wanted to say
thanks to her.

“She explained that it was she and her
best friend of the time who had saved me. She said, ‘When we found you, you
were very poorly, and the reason that you are very lucky is that not only did
we happen to go by, but the ambulance was just around the corner’.

“I spoke to her about the article and
the photographs, but she said that she didn’t really want to do it. And I was
glad, actually, because I didn’t want to, either. If Angela’s parents were to
see it, they’d have to relive it again, so I’m glad it didn’t happen.”

The day after Don’s accident, Chas Chandler had come
up from London to meet with the band. “Chas came to stay with me in
Wolverhampton for a few days,” says Swinn. “He was shocked by the news, but he
also saw the promotion advantages in it. Everything was a story to him. And
then, of course, he was concerned with the gigs that had already been booked.”

“He met with the
rest of the band at Jim’s house,” Don says. “Jim’s younger brother Frank was
there, fixing some plumbing, and when Chas said they might have to cancel some
gigs on the Isle of Man, Frank said that he could play. I’d given Frank my
first Ludwig kit to develop his drumming.”

A couple
of months after the accident, Don was back with Slade. His speedy recovery
surprised everybody, and only his fit condition made it possible. Many years of
athletics, boxing and the exertion of being a drummer helped him recover
physically, but mentally it was not that easy. “Don got back to working rather
quickly,” his sister Carol comments, “but only because the rest of the band
helped him. He couldn’t remember a thing.”

“After
the accident, we as a band and a close-knit unit rallied round him to help,”
Dave seconds. “It must have been difficult for Don, not being able to remember
the day before, but we supported him as a group, helping him to remember
things. But Don had such a good sense of humour, which seemed to override a lot
of things. I think the camaraderie, as we called it in the band, and Don’s
sense of humour helped.”

“I dealt
with it by making fun of myself,” Don agrees, “and very quickly, I got back in
the studio. I remember that Chas would cue me through the control-room window,
because I couldn’t remember the simplest things. I was doing the beats and he
was counting and then, sometimes, I’d drum something else that I knew. It was
about being reminded of things. Just cue me in.”

Slade
were recording their next single, ‘My Friend Stan’, with ‘My Town’ as the
B-side. By then, all songs were penned by Nod and Jim, and the single was
released in September 1973, reaching number two in the charts. “When we first
went back in the recording studio to do ‘My Friend Stan’, our engineer, Alan
O’Duffy, understood my problem,” Don recalls. “He was so nice. He had worked
with us on most of the early hits. It was him who suggested I keep diaries. He
said, ‘You write down what you have done and what you have to do. That will
help exercise your brain.’ I always used to have a soft spot for Alan because
of that.”

“I then
started buying him a diary each year,” says Carol, “a big book where he could
write down everything.”

After Don’s release,
he went to the Brands Hatch motor-racing circuit in Kent. “There were a lot of people there, like Cozy Powell and
Keith Emerson, and they took part in a charity race,” Len Tuckey explains. “Don was there and, although he wasn’t fully recovered, he
was smiling and everything, so he seemed to be OK, which was a relief for
everybody. We knew he was going to be fine. He just had to heal, basically.
Everyone was very, very happy with that.”

“In
reality, I felt like shit,” Don reveals. “I wasn’t prepared, neither physically
nor mentally. I was on walking sticks, I had no hair, my skull was held
together with clamps and I really didn’t want to be there. A lot of bands
attended that gathering and I remember just sitting down in a corner. Everybody
was drinking and partying and I felt terrible. Then Olivia Newton-John came
over and sat with me and she was fantastic. She was holding my hand and talking
to me. I’ll always remember that, because she was great.”